The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  Peace reigned even in Galicia, where Goluchowski was gradually gathering round him a party of adherents of his own policy of activism.94 Most important of all, he was persuading considerable numbers of his fellow-countrymen to enter the Government service, and finding places for them,95 by evicting the former German or Czech officials (many of whom then moved to Hungary or Transylvania), so that the administration of Galicia was becoming mainly Polish. It cannot be said that he had yet converted the Galician Poles as a whole to activism, but the atmosphere among them was changing perceptibly from frank hostility to readiness to collaborate on acceptable terms: put otherwise, territorial demands were beginning to give way to political ones. In any case, the extremists were, for the time, out of action.

  The bill for this was, as usual, paid chiefly by the Ruthenes. The central authorities still managed to afford them a shadow of protection against Goluchowski’s pressure,96 and in 1849 they had been allowed to open a ‘national House’ in Lemberg as a cultural centre; it was visited by Francis Joseph when he toured Galicia in 1856. But the Ruthenes had to lay aside all hopes of administrative concessions, and the cultural crumbs which they were allowed to pick up from under the Polish table were desperately meagre. The House was not, incidentally, the only cultural centre of this people. While the St Georgites were still their official leaders, their authority was being increasingly challenged from two sides. On the one hand, there were the younger ‘Ukrainophiles’, against whom, indeed, everyone in authority combined; yet their movement had in itself the great innate force that the language and popular culture which its leaders were trying to develop was really that of the local peasant masses. Secondly, following Pogodin’s earlier tours97 another Russian emissary had come to Lemberg in 1850 and had founded there a little circle whose tenets were that the Ruthenes were a branch of Great Russians and their language, a dialect of Russian, and their programme, to make it so. Another branch of their activities was the conversion of the Uniates to the Orthodox Church; this, it is true, was propagated less in Galicia than in Cholm, across the Russian frontier. Supplied with funds from Russia, this group founded its own institution (the Matyca) and issued a newspaper of its own. Strangely enough, it was left unmolested both by Vienna and by Goluchowski, who seems to have seen an advantage in any movement which split further unity of the Ruthenes.98 For the rest, the St Georgites, finding the dice weighted too heavily against them, adopted the favourite Central European device of ‘retiring into passivity’.

  This acceptance of the ruling order did not, however, extend either to Lombardy-Venetia, or to Hungary. It is true that the police discovered only one serious conspiracy in the former provinces the origin of which was wholly domestic, and that was on a relatively small scale (the ‘martyrs of Mantua’, i.e. the persons suffering the death penalty on this occasion, numbered only five, although five more death sentences were passed). The rising which led to the storming of the main gate in Milan was more serious (ten Austrian officers and other ranks were killed and fifty-nine wounded), but the initiative here had come from abroad – from the exiled Mazzini. Radetzky put this down with a severity (Milan was placed under a ‘rigorous state of siege’, seventy-nine persons were executed and several hundreds imprisoned, while 209 political exiles suffered the confiscation of all or part of their properties)99 which was effective, and in general, he was able to maintain ‘order’ adequately enough; but this was because the country was too full of spies and soldiers for disaffection to organize or manifest itself on a large scale. Here, even more than in Vienna or Prague, imprisonments and floggings were frequent,100 and the great bulk of the population, at least above the peasant level, undoubtedly regarded the Austrian regime as one of foreign domination, and a hateful one at that. Such relative acceptance of it as was shown was due chiefly to the fact that during these years the stimulus of official encouragement of revolt from abroad was lacking.101

  If we dwell in greater detail on the development of feeling in Hungary, this is not only because it was more complex (the populations concerned were also far larger), but also because it mattered far more to the Monarchy what course it took. Lombardy was destined in the event to be lost to the Monarchy within a few years after 1855, and Venetia, only a few years later, and in neither case were the feelings of the populations concerned the decisive factor; nor were the losses fatal to the Monarchy. But without Hungary, the Monarchy could hardly continue to exist, and whether it could be retained would depend, not on the ambitions of outside Powers, but on whether the country itself would accept the regime; or if not that regime, then any alternative one which Francis Joseph might offer.

  In the years which we are now discussing, there were many variants of opinion, not only among the total population of the Hungarian Lands, but even among the traditional ‘Hungarian’ ruling class. Even among these, there were some active collaborators – the contingent which every nation throws up, in every situation, of time-servers and place-seekers, and of men only concerned to take advantage of the opportunities for self-enrichment offered by some aspects of the regime; even some who acted out of conviction, either because they approved the regime or because, while disapproving it, they yet thought Hungary’s own best hope for the future lay in her accommodating herself as best she could to an inevitable situation; this last group included one or two distinguished figures whose presence in it surprised their old associates.

  At the opposite extreme there had stood, from the first, a party which was committed to nothing short of the separation of Hungary from the Monarchy, and was therefore a limine irreconcilable. In the first three or four years after Világos, the views of this party were given much international publicity and attracted much sympathy, especially in Britain and the USA, owing to the activities of the émigrés, and especially of Kossuth. The position of the emigration had been the occasion of a stormy international incident at the very outset of its existence, for after Kossuth and those who had crossed the Danube with him had been provisionally interned in Vidin, in North Bulgaria, Austria and Russia had demanded their extradition. Britain and France had, however, put very strong pressure, going to the length of a naval demonstration, on the Porte to refuse the demand, and a compromise had eventually been reached under which Kossuth and a few others had been interned in Kiutahia, in Asia Minor, the rest of his followers either returning to Hungary under promise of an amnesty, or dispersing into various Western countries. Kossuth had stayed in Kiutahia until October 1851, but then the United States had invited him to visit them as their guest, and sent a frigate for him. He had not been allowed to land in Italy or France, but had broken his journey at Southampton and made a tour of England, where he was greeted with an enthusiasm such as the country had, perhaps, never before shown to a foreigner. After a month he had gone on to America, where he had addressed over five hundred meetings, to audiences no less enthusiastic. He had then returned to London, to make his home there, until times changed.

  Kossuth had not, indeed, been able to persuade any Western Government to accord him diplomatic recognition, or to take any other official action in that direction, but the sympathy which his beguiling personality and his magnificent eloquence had aroused, and the identification which he had created of the cause of Hungary with that of freedom, had been a significant factor in the international atmosphere of the day and a strong embarrassment to Austria’s endeavours to win foreign sympathy for her regime.

  Kossuth had his followers in Hungary, although what proportion they constituted of the Hungarian people, no man can say. The police records, were they available, would not help, for hundreds of people were arrested as dangerous opponents of the regime whose only recorded offence had been to sport a buttonhole in forbidden colours, strike up a seditious song over their cups, or use a drastic expression to some officious foreign clerk or gendarme. Equally, many escaped the notice of the police who really deserved it. There were, however, a goodly number – more than would have been found among a people less sanguine and mor
e realistically minded than the Hungarian – who were willing to put their convictions to the test of action. In the autumn of 1851 the police came on the tracks of one really widespread conspiracy, the organizer of which, a certain Colonel Mack, proposed to raise the country in the name of Kossuth, as its lawful Head of State. The centre of the plot was in the Szekel area of Transylvania, but it had its agents, who were organized on a secret system borrowed from Mazzini, all over the country. The ringleaders of this conspiracy, with a number of people probably quite unconnected with it, were arrested in the spring of 1852. Another conspiracy, headed by a certain Oszlopy – this time an entirely hare-brained enterprise – was unmasked (and easily repressed) in the following June.

  Had the odds against such enterprises been less obviously overwhelming, many Hungarians would certainly have joined them; had they reached the stage of action, and had that action promised success, they would have found more adherents still. But even if successful, they would not have been universally popular among the Hungarians themselves, for the opposition to the extremists in 1849 had not been based solely on fear. Not only the aulic magnates who had formed themselves into the Old Conservative Group, but many other Hungarians had been genuinely shocked by the dethronement of the Habsburgs. They regarded the Pragmatic Sanction as constituting both the legal basis for Hungary’s existence and the best real guarantee of it, and had heaved a sigh of relief when Kossuth and his fellow-extremists had left the country. Far from being irreconcilable, they had been truly anxious for a reconciliation with the Crown, and had even believed, naïvely but none the less sincerely, that events would now follow the course which they had taken after Rákóczi’s wars – which had been far more prolonged and whole-hearted than that of 1849 – and would see the conclusion of a new Peace of Szatmár in which the Crown and the nation would join hands again on a basis of mutual respect for one another’s historic rights.

  Bach’s announcement declaring the Hungarian Constitution null and void had done relatively little to diminish these hopes. It had been regarded as an act of war, which would be cancelled in its turn, with the dethronement. Haynau’s bloody purge had given the optimists a severer shock, particularly in view of Schwarzenberg’s and Francis Joseph’s own open endorsement of it. But even that blow had not been mortal, for Generals are expected to be bloody-minded and military regimes are by definition temporary. And in fact, some measure of optimism had not seemed entirely absurd even during the Provisorissimum. The regime had made one or two concessions which had been taken (and probably with justice) as indications that its mind was not yet fully made up as to the future.102

  Meanwhile, Gehringer, who was genuinely anxious for a reconciliation between Hungary and the Crown, had made things as smooth as possible for the Hungarians. The authorities had not been unduly severe towards those not falling into the prescribed categories. The screening of officials had been carried out mercifully enough, the excuse of duresse being accepted wherever it was at all plausible,103 and the regime was, as we have said elsewhere, still national in many respects.

  The Old Conservatives had been particularly optimistic during these months, and had continued to press their case on the Court, and to expound it in print, with great fluency and cogency.

  Then, however, had come the second Provisorium, which was generally, and correctly, recognized as signifying the Crown’s intention to make the new regime permanent. Hungary was thus to lose – for ever, unless she could recover them by persuasion or force – the constitutional freedom and territorial boundaries in defence of which she had many times laid down far more lives than had fallen victim to Haynau. These losses were, of course, far deeper than those inflicted by the absolutism on the Monarchy’s Western peoples, who had suffered no territorial mutilation at all, and whose self-government had for a century past been purely nominal. And the absolutism itself was far more burdensome to Hungary than it was to the Western Lands, and brought fewer compensations. The benefits most freely acknowledged by Hungarian writers are the reforms introduced in the judicial services. All non-Hungarian writers are loud also in their praises of the efficiency of the new administrators, satirically dubbed by Széchenyi (the name then caught on) the ‘Bach Hussars’,104 and we may concede them the virtues of industry and incorruptibility, but we cannot but feel that their efficiency was perceptibly reduced by the inability of most of them to understand a word of the language spoken by the populations whose affairs they were supposed to order, and by their unfamiliarity with the local psychology and habits.105 And it may be added, parenthetically, that their own life was not particularly happy. They were usually almost without company in the country town or village in which they were stationed, boycotted by the local gentry, at cross-purposes with the rest of the population. They were paid relatively well, but also burdened with heavy expenditure, in which the cost of their uniforms was a large item.

  Efficient or not – and for the reasons given, it was certainly less efficient than that of their colleagues in the West – their role was expensive to the country, whose old system of government had at least been cheap. And besides much more for her own administration, Hungary now had to pay her full quota towards the central services of the Monarchy, and also a proportionate share of the national debt. Thus taxation of all kinds had risen enormously; and if the bulk of direct taxation was now falling on the nobles, the poorest peasant had to pay more for his meat, his drinks and his tobacco.106 Many Hungarians suffered very heavy additional losses when the Government refused to accept the ‘Kossuth notes’ as legal currency.

  Some classes were, it is true, making bigger incomes: the large landlords were doing very well out of the economic unification of the Monarchy, impinging on a situation of high agricultural prices, and fortunes were being made out of some of the new industries. But the country as a whole regarded the big landlords as a foreign class, and many of the industrial profits were actually going to real foreigners. The medium and small landowners who constituted the backbone of the real nation had, as we have said, been largely ruined by the land reform, particularly since many of them were, for political reasons, deliberately kept waiting for their compensation.

  There were cultural grievances also: the Protestants groaned under the Catholic reaction imposed by Thun and Rauscher, which was not even agreeable to many Hungarian Catholics, who regarded it as another Viennese move against Hungary, and while the lower clergy resented the increased power now placed in the hands of the bishops, the bishops themselves found their historic importance reduced. The Jews, too, remembered that Hungary’s Parliament had given them full freedom and equality.

  The appointment of the Archduke proved another change for the worse. When announced, it was represented as a concession to Hungary’s status, and at first was welcomed as such by certain circles, especially the magnates, who had despised Gehringer for his bourgeois origin and his personally unpretentious habits. But in respects other than glamour, the light of which reached only a narrow circle, it was the opposite of beneficial to the Hungarian people, for the Archduke was an austere military figure, to whom every Hungarian was a rebel, actual or potential.

  One effect of the Definitivum was obviously to fan extremist feeling – the more so as its enactment practically coincided with Kossuth’s emergence from internment. The Mack conspiracy, in fact, followed immediately on these two events. There was, however, relatively little increase in active resistance to the regime, particularly since after the bloody repression of the conspiracy Kossuth himself warned his adherents to attempt no more such ventures until the international situation grew more favourable.107 But there was no corresponding growth of willingness to collaborate with the regime: rather the contrary. The Old Conservatives, partly in dudgeon at their repulse by the regime (which had rejected them far rather than they it), partly out of fear of compromising themselves irretrievably with their fellow-countrymen, withdrew into a passivity whence they were hardly to emerge until 1859–60, when they played the transien
t but important role to be described, as offering the only alternative to absolutist bureaucracy which Francis Joseph was then prepared to consider. The reaction of the bulk of the nation was one of relatively passive, but obstinate, hostility. It was an attitude rather than a movement, and one which at that time lacked leadership, a positive programme, and even much hope,108 for the man who was later to give it all three, Francis Deák, having been saved rather by happy chance than by his own will from Haynau’s and Schwarzenberg’s vengeance,109 was now living in almost hermit-like retirement on his estate in remote Zala and had himself no advice for those who consulted him except that they should on no account countenance the regime by serving it, even with the best intentions. But it was steadfast, and as time passed it hardened rather than crumbled into a solidity which transcended religious, political and even social differences.